I couldn't help but put myself in Art's shoes in these scenes of the graphic novel. "Like you, Artie, my hands were always delicate", Vladek recalls to Art which emphasizes the interchangeability between father and son, story-teller and story-listener between the times of war and peace. But most significantly the breakage of history with a panel from the present serves as a reminder to the reader that while the dialogue might be exaggerated and exclamation-marked, this is an eyewitness account of something real and concrete. The reminders of being told a story by Vladek serve to suspend the disbelief further regarding the animal depictions and also again dissuade any notions of an inaccurate story retelling; the source is right there.
Using the lingo from "Show and Tell" from the textbook on a comic strip that caught my eye, the words lock in the "meaning" of the sequence, allowing the pictures to take off. Art decides to draw to the text multiple blocks which add up to a bigger Vladek. When looking at the text, is is purely objective and doesn't share too much emotion or weight of the deaths it describes. That frees up the picture to express that emotion. Each box is cordoned off to a group of Vladek's family which is forever lost, which add up to the bigger, sadder Vladek contemplative on the scarcity of snapshots of them. The effect of saying the least on unspeakable topics in comics is something literature can only try to emulate. Here is Vladek, decades after the Holocaust, still mourning not their loss, but the loss of the memories that could have been. In the context of Vladek's health problems and eminent death, the sadness Vladek has cannot be written but only shown.
No comments:
Post a Comment